Question

“The French revolution and those in North and South America have been transformed into founding myths in their respective countries and are thought to mark the emergence of citizenship, of national economies, of the very idea of the nation. But in their own time, the revolutions’ lessons were inconclusive. . . . The revolutions of the Americas began by drawing on ideas of [liberty and citizenship] . . . to redefine sovereignty and power within imperial polities but ended up producing new states that shared world space with reconfigured empires. The secession of states from the British, French, and Spanish empires did not produce nations of equivalent citizens any more than it produced a world of equivalent nations. . . . Popular sovereignty was far from the accepted norm in western Europe and within empires’ spaces overseas it was unclear whether the idea of [individual rights] would be a contagious proposition or one [restricted to] a select few. . . . The nation had become an imaginable possibility in world politics. But the leaders of [empires] did not want to limit their political compass to national boundaries.”
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, historians, Empires in World History, 2010

a) Explain ONE difference in the arguments expressed in the two sources regarding the effect of revolutions on the global political order.

b) Explain ONE development from the period of the Atlantic Revolutions that grounded “social relations for the first time on the principle of formal equality” as claimed in the second paragraph of Source 1.

c) Identify ONE way in which empires in the nineteenth century (other than those mentioned in the passage) successfully resisted revolutionary change, as suggested in Source 2.

Answer 1

Answer:

a. One difference in the arguments expressed in the two sources regarding the effect of the revolution on the global political order is the main idea of them. In the first source, it states, " the American and French revolutionaries expanded the whole horizon of the age, opening a path of linear progress, grounding social relations for the first time on the principle of formal equality, lifting the weight of tradition and royal charisma, and instituting a system of rules that made those in political authority accountable to a community of citizens." Meaning, the main idea the "whole horizon of the age" While in the second source it states, "The French revolution and those in North and South America have been transformed into founding myths in their respective countries and are thought to mark the emergence of citizenship, of national economies, of the very idea of the nation. But in their own time, the revolutions’ lessons were inconclusive. . . . The revolutions of the Americas began by drawing on ideas of [liberty and citizenship] . . . to redefine sovereignty and power within imperial polities but ended up producing new states that shared world space with reconfigured empires." Showing that the main idea was the coming(emergence) together of citizenship.

b. One development from the period of the Atlantic revolutions that grounded "social relations for the first time on the principle of formal equality" is the institution a system of rules that made those in political authority accountable to a community of citizens.

c. One way in which empires in the nineteenth-century successfully resisted revolutionary change is the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman isolation was finally and definitively broken, setting the stage for the more significant reforms that transformed the empire during the remainder of the 19th century.

Explanation: